What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the term used to describe a set of processes that aim in optimizing a website for search engines.
SEO is important not only for getting high quality visitors from search, but it’s also a way to improve the user-friendliness of your website and increase its credibility.
Search engines are using complex algorithms to determine which pages to include in their index and the order they show these pages in the search results.
SEO is the way to ‘speak’ to search engines in a language they can understand and give them with more information about your website.
On Page SEO
On Page SEO refers to settings you can apply on your website so that it is optimized for search engines.The most important On-Page SEO tips are:
1) Having optimized titles and descriptions
2) Proper URL Structures
3) User friendly navigation (breadcrumbs, user sitemaps)
4) Optimized internal links
5) Text Formatting (use of h1,h2,bold etc)
6) Image optimization (image size, proper image names, use of ALT tag)
7) User friendly 404 pages
8) Fast loading pages
9) Mobile Friendly pages
10) Top quality fresh content (This is always the most important SEO factor!)
11) External links (no broken links or links to ‘bad’ sites)
Off-page SEO
Unlike On- page SEO, Off-page SEO refers to activities you can perform outside the boundaries of your website. The most important are:
1) Link Building
Link building is the most popular and effective off-Page SEO method. Basically by building external links to your website, you are trying to gather as many ‘votes’ as you can, so that you can bypass your competitors and rank higher. For example, if someone likes this article and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is like telling search engines that this page has good information. Over the years webmasters have been trying to build links to their websites to get higher rankings and they ‘invented’ a number of ways to increase link count.
Blog Directories – something like yellow pages but each entry had a link pointing to a website.
Forum Signatures – Many people were commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature).
Comment link – The same concept as forum signatures where you would comment on some other website or blog in order to get a link back. Even worse, instead of using your real name you could use keywords so instead of writing ‘comment by Alex Chris’, you wrote ‘comment by How to lose weight’.
Article Directories – By publishing your articles in article directories you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles.
Shared Content Directories – Websites like hubpages allowed you to publish content and in return you could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.
Link exchange schemes – Instead of trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and exchange links. In other words, I could link your website from mine and you could do the same. In some cases you could even do more complicated exchanges by doing a 3-way link: I link to your website from my website but you link to my website from a different website.
2) Social Media Marketing
3) Social bookmarking
We will examine these in more details below, but first let me explain about the importance and benefits of off-page SEO.
How does a search engine work step by step?
Search Engines Using a 3 Step Work Process
1) Web Crawling.
This is the means by which search engines can find out what is published out on the World Wide Web. ...
2) Indexing.
Once a spider has crawled a web page, the copy that is made is returned to the search engine and stored in a data center. ...
3) The Algorithm.
SEO tools
SEO tools are the magic solution to optimize the website for good search engine rankings. It provides advanced technical solutions, increasing visibility which harvests higher traffic towards a particular website.
SEO tools are the magic solution to optimize the website for good search engine rankings. It provides advanced technical solutions, increasing visibility which harvests higher traffic towards a particular website.
1. Google Keyword Planner, Analytics, Search Console, etc. Traffic growth to the Ahrefs Blog shown in Google Analytics.... (Google makes some of the best free SEO tools. Period.
· Find and research keywords with Keyword Planner.
· Identify trends with, um, Trends.
· Uncover and fix technical and on‐page issues with Search Console.
· Analyze how many people are visiting your website, who they are, and where they come from with Analytics.
· Gather, process, and analyze all kinds of SEO data with Sheets.
· Check how fast your site loads with Page speed Insights
2. Answer the Public
3. Ahrefs' Free Backlink Checker
4. Beam Us Up
5. Yoast SEO
6. Keyworddit
7. Hunter
8. SEO Web Page Analyzer